“Unexpected Hairstreak in the leafhopper area…”
I was on my way to Grafton Wood this morning, for another attempt on the Emerald Damselflies, when I suddenly realised that I couldn’t quite be bothered to walk across four fields and a wood to get to the relevant pond, so I kept driving and ended up at Trench Wood instead. It was gloriously sunny, and in the space of the first couple of hundred metres I found scores of butterflies – Peacocks, Brimstones, Silver-washed Fritillaries, Gatekeepers, Meadow Browns, and Large and Small Skippers – plus one of my favourite photographers, who said she’d been standing in the same place for twenty minutes because the butterflies kept landing right in front of her. After we’d had a bit of a chat I moved on in search of smaller quarry, leaving J in Peacock Heaven.
I’d been hoping to find some hoppers and weevils, but I kept being distracted by bigger creatures and couldn’t seem to quite get my eye in when it came to searching out the tiny guys. Nonetheless I had a good time, and took plenty of photos, right up to the point at which the sky closed in and it began to threaten rain. I decided to make one last pass along the main ride before heading back to the car, and it was there, as I was checking a little group of aspen saplings for bugs and beetles, that I almost tripped over this Purple Hairstreak.
Purple Hairstreaks spend most of their lives in the canopy of oak trees, where they live in small colonies. They mainly eat honeydew from the surface of the oak leaves, and don’t really need to come down onto low vegetation unless it’s very dry, or they’ve exhausted their usual food supply, in which case they will sometimes take nectar. Back in the dry summer of 2018, when Trench Wood was busy with these tiny butterflies, I even saw a couple of them land on a mat of blanket weed in the pond, presumably to drink water. I’ve also noticed that they seem to be more inclined to descend from the trees to rest on low vegetation when they’re getting old and tired, but at that stage they’re generally too battered to be worth photographing.
None of which explains the presence of this individual, which I think was a male, at waist height on an aspen seedling at the base of a small oak tree. It most certainly isn’t dry at the moment – in fact some of the paths at Trench were so muddy today as to be unwalkable – and he was very fresh, with just a few tiny nicks in the outer edges of his wings. But there he was, and there he stayed for several minutes, while I edged closer and closer and gradually improved my shooting angle, until I was sure I had him fully in focus.
Having got my shots I thanked the butterfly and stepped back onto the ride, where I discovered that I was being watched – and listened to – by another photographer. He stepped forward to take some photos of his own, and the Purple Hairstreak promptly zoomed up into the oak. “Perhaps,” said the chagrined photographer, “I should have introduced myself first.”
